On 2/3/22 18:26, Slade Watkins wrote:
Hi there, Quick question for wireless folks: would backporting the rtw89 driver[1] (Realtek 8852AE) to kernels older than 5.16.y be possible at some point down the road? I ask this as, when testing a stable build of 5.15.y a bit ago, I had an issue where the driver wasn't present and the system I was testing it on wasn't happy and started kicking errors. (It's fairly new, so I did kind of expect that.) I was, however, able to solve this by manually building and installing the drivers so it wasn't that big of a deal. [1] https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89
If for some reason, you do not like my version of the kernel code in the GitHub repo that you reference, then you could use the Backports Project.
Backporting a driver into one of the stable trees is not a sanctioned activity. Stable kernels only get fixes for bugs, not new features such as a complete driver.
At least one distro packages rtw89 as kernel modules the same as my GitHub repo. That distro is openSUSE, which gets its source from that very repo. There may be others that provide similar packages.
Larry
